In 1957 I was a junior intern in the Vancouver General hospital. Myself and Gordon Warme were in charge of the medical ward called 1a, for staff patients in that month that had no other doctor. We were supervised by teaching consultants that came daily to observe our care. One was Dr. Boyce, a rheumatologist who was the Junior consultant and Russel Palmer, the senior consultant and notably aside , the originator of renal dialysis in North America.
       I was on call for 1a in the early morning hours when an old woman was admitted from Emergency in extremis. She was in the late process of dying, her blood pressure was 60/0 and she had a large, fungating cancerous tumor, grossly infected, on the right side of her neck at least as large as her head. She was unresponsive and there were no next of kin listed.
        These were the days of Levophed in the hospital. All patients that presented with blood pressures being unsustained,  if not by blood loss, were required as a routine to be given a Levophed drip, monitored by the interns, to raise the pressure to acceptable limits. No conditions were usually excluded from this routine. Thankfully this madness didn't last beyond the next  Medical executive meeting or so. I couldn"t bring myself to start a Levophed drip on this  dying person with tremendous pathology and gave her adequate sedation instead.
        When Dr. Boyce made early rounds that day he reamed me out in no uncertain terms for failing to treat the patient, as he termed it, not only for setting aside the hospital routine for unsustained maintanance of blood pressure, but for making an assumption that life or death was my decision to take. Accordingly I started a Levophed drip and monitored a miniscule blood pressure rise without any other change observed.
          When Dr. Palmer made his rounds in the afternoon he said to me, " What madness are you doing here with  this unfortunate woman who apparently still has no one to sensibly care for her." The message to me was clear. His opinion was my opinion. I took no solace from this because we were still in the uncertain state where individual decision making about treatment about each patient needed individual consideration rather than blanket ideas. Thankfully death took its course and her passage was serene and beyond our fruitless efforts and madness.

Every house including our's has night sounds. It's been particularly cold on Lotus Island this week and the temperature gradients between the inside and the outside of the house make the beam and studs and boards shift and squeak and crackle a little, the wind shakes the house infinitesmally, to which it objects. and the boughs of the cedar brush it gently.The sleeper who is hypervigilant also hears his head and ear contact on the pillow, his tinnitus, the bruit of his carotids at times and the crow on the roof. Thee sounds we have become accustomed to and are a collection unique to our house. Another's house sounds will have a different singularity.
       At 4am this morning I awoke with a new and unaccustomed sound. Was it the ice-maker dropping chunked ice, an intruder, or something else? As I went down the stairs into the kitchen where the sound was coming from it seemed to be a metallic sound originating from the tile floor. There had been a suggestion that an uninvited visitor had arrived the day before and I had set a mousetrap that night on the floor beside a baseboard with a bait of peanut butter. In the trap was a mouse and it was alive and struggling. The metallic sound came from the thrashing around of the trap on the tile. The mouse had ventured to far into the trap than usual to gnaw on the bait so his head was not crushed and he was trapped by the body.
        I have always had a primal fear of vermin, a legacy from my mother and the Middle Ages. I could deal with, albeit difficult, a dead mouse, but a living, wiggling, squiggling, pelvis and tail waving mouse struggling in agony is a different matter. I went back to bed to await its death and silence. I couldn't sleep however,  assailed by thoughts of the waning life force and with the reminder from the continuing sounds emanating from the kitchen floor.  I took my courage and put the mouse and the trap off the kitchen door onto the deck.
       Silence!  This morning at 8 o'clock he was dead. He had struggled another 18 inches from the spot I had laid him.  I'm sorry!  I must kill.  Rest in peace!
       

In 1979 several of us took on the mentorship for a year of a Vietnamese boat family that had been in a Malaysian camp for 2 years. We had no idea when they would arrive and we had an hour's notice they had at the identical day the our father in law, also a sponsor, arrived in our house to die of CA of the lung within the month that the family all lived with us.
     Father,wife,teenager,baby and wife pregnant. About two weeks after they arrived the father spoke to me that the customs had recorded his name incorrectly at entry. It was both reversed and misspelled. I said, "No problem. We'll just go down to the custom and immigration office and clear it up." Given that this was a busy time he and I waited in the lineup for over an hour until we could be processed. I explained the situation to the official at the wicket. She looked at me and said," I'm afraid it's too late to change that name now. He's been through customs now and the name he been provided with is now his name." When I tried to explain the importance of his concern  about his name she looked at me a if I was daft.
       Well. She didn't know that you are your name. For those who do not know their name, they understand in spades. You may wonder at the cacophonous activity in our household then and why I was bothering with a name. Maybe I'm stupid but my dying father in law was happily teaching the Malay visitors English from Eaton's catalogue, Joan was doing 90 percent of the nurturing of everyone and I needed to do something positive. I knew that when Jacob wrestled with God all night and was given for his effort the name of Israel he became Israel so it isn't the same.  Canada Customs is not God.
       Our name is the label whereby we identify ourselves, the tribe we belong to. and where we slot ourselves in the human race. It may not seem important to some but after Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Victoria all he had was his name, a suit of issued clothing and me.
         We left the office and I phoned my MP, Don Munro and got him within minutes. I told him what happened and he said, "That's bullshit !  Leave it to me! Go back there right now ! "  I know it is a bit sinful of me to feel a small surge of triumph that day. It's not often you can win against the bureaucracy. The sin, however, was I forgot at that moment, it was all about him and his name, and not about me.

When my youngest daughter was about 12 I guess, her mother sent her to Simpson-Sears to  pick up a prepaid package. The mail order clerk asked for some identification and the only thing she had in her wallet was her membership card in the Archie Club. There was no hassle from the department store since a member in good standing of the Archie Club would be deemed to have some status and also good taste in men. Archie was intrinsically cool but also beautifully naive: characteristics that endeared him to hundreds of young girls. They didn't identify with the sly, the macho and the slick. The clerk would have recognized a fellow traveler, albeit only 12.
       Even though Archie struggled with the usual trials and temptations he seemed to effortlessly overcome them with his continuing good nature. What's not to love? Certainly the Archie Club card today won't net you much headway at the airport or the customs office, but it tells us where your values are.
        Even more beautifully naive was Beaver. He may have been younger than Archie but he had those same endearing characteristics one of which was honesty. There is always safety when you can rely on your friends to say what they think. Our children classified their classmates as bady-bads, goody-goods and normals and claimed they were normals. I would have been more than satisfied with Beaver or Archie.
        The school principal said to Beaver, " Why do you want to be a garbage collecter when you grow up Beaver?"  He replied, "  Well, You don't have to wash your hands so much, and people don't mind if you smell." It's clear that Beaver was not quite ready for Betty or Veronica at that point but the candor he displayed would eventually give Archie and most of the rest of us a run for the money.
         It seems to me that  both of tthem will likely roll into adulthood becoming reliable  without becoming sly, macho and slick.

When one looks at today's foods, the ethnic cooking, the diet food, the cosmopolitan choices of ingredients available, the prepared foods and restaurant meals, the food stuffs of yesteryear are frequently forgotten!  The things we ate during the thirties and forties : pioneer food, and poor person's foodstuffs are of some interest, particularly to me. I have tried some of these recipes to take a fresh look at what we ate in those days.
      Raisin Pie was at least as common as apple pie in those days when I was a kid. No one eats raisin pie today but I was reminded how good it tasted when I made one and experienced a certain reminder of days gone by. It wouldn"t  put any more pounds on than Shoofly  Pie which Joan and I tried only once. When all you had for ingredients was brown sugar and molasses then that's what you used. We tried Apple Pan Dowdy with the Shoofly . They were both a disappointment  but they were not part of our history.
        I tried Irish Soda Bread and to give it authenticity, cooked  it in the fireplace on a grate over woodcoals since I didn't have chunks of peat. It wasn't bad for a bread without yeast or peat. Just  a bit labour intensive. I never tried Colcannon till I grew gobs of Kale one year so tried it mixed just with potatoes. It was delicious.
        My mother made Mock Apple Pie a few times during the war, with soda crackers, lemon juice and sugar  as a substitute for apples. Apples were in short supply. That's why crackers, lemon juice and raisins instead. Mock Apple Pie is a poor substitute for apple pie but it was surprisingly deceptive when I made it from her old recipe. If we were still hungry after supper my mother said we could have bread and milk laced with sugar. I tried it the other day. It was filling.
          I had never eaten Brewis 'til we went to Nova Scotia and I ordered in a restaurant. We don't have salt cod here on the wet coast and available but Brewis isn't too bad at all and fits in with food of yesteryear for sure. The food available today is only a reflection of the preponderance of ingredients. If you can mix twenty ingredients together it will be fit for the gourmet to speak  about.
          I
        

Much ado has accompanied the widespread discovery of skeletal remains that suggest that several species of the Homo genera have existed in the remote past and that these genera have failed to thrive is attributed in part to the competition of Homo sapiens. Skeletal remains may suggest such species existed but the bones themselves do not provide a cogent or blanket idea of how or why the species were eliminated. For example, did Neanderthal mankind have an opposable thumb? I don't know and how would anyone else know if they couldn't examine the multiple bones of the wrist and particularly the position of the scaphoid and trapezium.
     In 2014 I wrote an article on the thumb of Homo sapiens and on mine and all others of that genera. The opposable thumb is provided with strength and motion by two small muscles in the hand, Opponens pollicis and its friend Adducter pollicis. The muscles provide the motor for fine pinch and grip, a skill available, refined as far a we know, only in Homo sapiens because of the completely opposable thumb. What I am about to tell you is earth-shaking news, not just about dinky little muscles making pill-rolling motions with the thumb and index finger. Pay attention because this is important. From the article *
       *  "Homo sapiens could never have the fine and complex pinch unless they also could lift the thumb away from the palm. Mankind's opposable and complex digital sinews brought into play by extension of the thumb has allowed the singularity of this early gift as the foundation for the development of intellect. How so you say. Intellect builds capacity, but capacity builds intellect. A stunning chicken and egg interaction that fueled the development of both. Possibly Homo sapiens overcame Neanderthal mankind due to the ability to perform complex pinch and grip and the ensuing intellect that lead to clever deception rather than simple head bashing activity." *
       The importance of anatomy in the development of intellect should never be under estimated. The evolution of change and its rate of change has gone from selection of Homo sapiens out of the Hominidae family to the conquering of interstellar space by way of the opposable thumb. To suggest the foregoing is overstatement, may be to deny the domino effects of evolution.  If you think this is a reach too far---not so----
time was on our side and great changes come from a chain of little things.

The phenomenon of mind body interaction is mysterious.
    When Joan and I bought our piece of ground on Lotus Island the first job was to look for water. We had the use of a jointly owned well but we needed a backup plan. We hired a witcher. There is a reason it is called witching. It may be more accurate to call it bewitching. I had some knowledge of the fruitless search for water from the movie Mr. Blandings builds his Dream House but we were on the wet coast, surrounded by water and in the drainage basin of the zone called The Hundred Hills.
      Our dowser came with his witching rod of willow and dowsed in the most likely of places. I expected the process to be amusing and primitive. Sure enough, his dowser dipped here and there but these areas
 were too near the surface for use other than watering plants if it were cribbed as a shallow well. More important to me than water however was the mystery of the dowsing.
        I was so intrigued that I began dowsing myself as an inquiry into the internal-external process. I used forked willow, forked vine maple and a wire coat hanger, When I approached an area on the property where water was probable each of the rods I had chosen dipped easily and strongly, including the wire  coat hanger of course. What was this phenomenon? Speculation is not a substitute for explanation. I reviewed the interesting literature on water witching, also called dowsing and divination. There are no studies that give credence to the process or suggest any evidence basis for it, but I had to determine if it was me that was crazy. I was convinced that though my mind said this was nonsense,  my body responded as if it wasn't, Cognitive dissonance. My dipping rods seemed real including the metal one.
        It was no surprise that water was noted because we had ground water everywhere and rising to the surface. It was no surprise to the skeptical that a wire coat hanger was identical to willow and vine maple. The only common factor was me and the incapacity to set aside the mind body reaction that misleads and allows reaction to supplant evaluation. Think before you act my dad used to say without having any idea he was talking about evidence based observations.I suppose it is understandable and human as dowsing for everything from gold and jewel to water has been done for 400 years and we all have a tiny bit of us that like to think that magic is really possible.